Is it ethical to copy a website to Figma?

Yes, for the use cases this article covers — redesigning your own product, redesigning a client's site, auditing a competitor's work, or pulling inspiration into a reference file. It is not okay to copy a competitor's design and ship it as your own product. Use the copy as a starting point for analysis or for redesigning a site you have rights to.

How accurate is the copy?

For most modern sites, layout, typography, color, and images come in cleanly. Auto-layout maps well where the source uses flexbox or grid. The capture is of the rendered page, so what you see in the browser is what lands in Figma. Animations, videos, and canvas-based elements are the main exceptions.

Can I copy a logged-in page?

Yes. If you can see the page in Chrome, the extension can capture it. The capture happens locally in your browser — nothing gets sent anywhere except to your Figma file on paste.

How is this different from screenshotting and tracing?

Screenshots are flat pixels. Copying with Export to Figma gives you real Figma layers — editable text, swappable images, restylable frames. You skip the tracing step entirely and start your redesign on top of an accurate starting point.

Does the copy include hover states or interactions?

It captures the state of the page at the moment you export. To get a hover state, hover over the element first to trigger it, then export. To capture multiple states, export each one and place them side by side in Figma as separate frames.

How to Copy a Website to Figma for a Redesign

Every redesign project starts the same way. Someone — a client, a PM, your boss — points at an existing website and says "make this better." And before you can make it better, you have to understand it. Which means getting it into Figma.

Most designers I know have a default workflow for this: screenshot the page, drop it into Figma as an image, and start sketching over the top. It works. It also throws away every editable layer in the process. Two days later you're tracing rectangles to match the spacing you could have just had.

Here's the workflow that doesn't waste those two days.

Why designers copy websites into Figma

Before getting to the how, the why matters — because the workflow changes based on the goal:

Redesigning your own product. You want a faithful Figma capture of what's live today, so the redesign starts from reality, not your half-remembered mental model.
Pitching a client redesign. You want a side-by-side "current state / proposed state" in one Figma file. Compelling, fast.
Competitor audit. You want a competitor's full site in one Figma file so you can annotate, extract their color palette, and find the patterns they got right (and wrong).
Design inspiration. You saw a section you loved and want to take it apart. Real layers let you actually do that.

We'll focus on the redesign workflow here, but the technique is the same for all four.

The old way: screenshots and 8 hours of manual rebuild

I'll spare you the long version, but: pull screenshots, drop them in Figma, set up a 12-column grid, eyeball spacing, eyedrop colors, hand-type every heading, draw rectangles around every button. Honest tally on a typical landing page: 6–8 hours of work that produces a static traced approximation, not an editable foundation.

By the time you're done with the rebuild, you've burned the day, and you haven't made a single redesign decision.

The new way: capture, paste, iterate

Here's the workflow:

Install the Export to Figma Chrome extension (free; 10 exports/month).
Open the site you're redesigning in Chrome.
Click the extension icon → Export. The page lands on your clipboard.
Switch to Figma. Cmd+V. Done.

Total time: under a minute. If you're not familiar with the full capture mechanics, the import guide goes deeper on the technical side.

What you get on the Figma canvas is the entire page as a frame, with every text node, image, color, and layout container as a real Figma layer. You can now do design work on top of an accurate baseline.

A real walkthrough

Let me show you the workflow on a concrete example. Imagine your client is a small Shopify store and they want a homepage redesign.

Minute 1. Open their homepage in Chrome. Click Export to Figma. Paste into a new Figma file. You now have a frame called "Homepage" with their hero, product grid, testimonials, and footer — all as editable layers.

Minute 2. Switch the viewport dropdown in the extension to "Mobile" and export again. Paste the mobile capture next to the desktop one. You can now design responsive variants from real data.

Minute 3. Open the Figma layers panel. Find the headline text node. Retype it: "Outdoor gear for people who actually go outside." Pick a heading and apply a new font. The old design is still there as a reference — you're literally redesigning on top of it.

That's the first three minutes. The next three hours are the actual design work, which is what you wanted to spend your time on in the first place.

4 redesign moves you can make in 10 minutes after the copy

Once the live site is in Figma, here are four high-leverage moves that take a redesign from "traced rectangles" to "real direction":

1. Color system swap (3 minutes)

Open the imported frame. Pull every distinct color into a Figma color style: surface/primary, surface/secondary, text/primary, text/muted, accent/brand. Now swap the brand accent to your proposed new color and watch the whole page update.

2. Type scale rationalization (2 minutes)

Imported sites often have 12 different font sizes for no reason — 14.5px, 15px, 16.4px — left over from years of small fixes. Pull headings and body into a clean 6-step scale (e.g. 12/14/16/18/24/32/48). Apply across the frame. The page already reads cleaner without redesigning a single layout.

3. Auto-layout cleanup (2 minutes)

The extension maps flex/grid to auto-layout where it can. Click any section and inspect the auto-layout settings. Tighten padding, normalize gaps. The page becomes properly responsive in Figma.

4. Component extraction (3 minutes)

Find a repeated UI element — a card, a CTA button, a stat block — and turn it into a Figma component. Now changes propagate. You've started a design system from the existing site, in three minutes.

After ten minutes, you have: a live-site baseline, a color system, a type scale, structured auto-layout, and your first component. That's the kind of foundation a redesign actually needs.

Ethics: when copying a website is fine, and when it isn't

A quick honest note, because this question comes up:

Totally fine: Capturing your own product to redesign it. Capturing your client's site for the project they hired you to do. Pulling competitor pages into a private audit file. Building a personal inspiration library. Capturing AI-generated UI (v0, Bolt, Lovable) to refine in Figma.

Not fine: Copying a competitor's design wholesale and shipping it as your own product. That's not a workflow problem; that's a copyright problem. The tool doesn't change the rules.

If you're in any gray area — "can I use a captured competitor section as a reference for my own design?" — the answer is the same as it always was: inspiration is fine, reproduction is not.

Where to go next

Try the redesign workflow.

Install Export to Figma free and copy your first site to Figma in under a minute. 10 exports a month on the free tier — no credit card.

Add to Chrome — Free See pricing

Two articles that pair well with this one:

How to Import Any Website Into Figma — the deep technical walkthrough of the capture step.
html.to.design vs Anima vs Export to Figma — if you're not sure which tool fits your workflow, this is the honest comparison.

Or just install the extension and try it on whatever site is open in your other tab. That's how most people decide.